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Sci-fi has become one of the most used genres in popular film, with major franchises like the MCU, the DCU, Star Wars, and Avatar belonging to it. While these films use sci-fi to tell exciting stories, few movies are actually interested in the science more than the fiction. Movies that attempt to actually explain fictional phenomenon can be incredibly interesting, as was the case here.
Alex Garland’s Annihilation Was Released Eight Years Ago
2018’s Annihilation is one of the most beloved sci-fi movies of the 2010s, and it is still an achievement to this day. The film is based on the first entry in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, which follows a government organization known as Southern Reach that investigates a quarantined zone known as Area X. Area X has been reclaimed by nature, with it taking over any vestiges of human civilization and transforming everything into natural phenomena. Humans who go into Area X are subject to strange changes, with many dying, becoming diseased, or turning on each other.
The Southern Reach Trilogy is a cosmic horror sci-fi story, with it taking inspiration from many of the most iconic entries in the canon. Cosmic horror is a notoriously difficult subgenre to adapt into visual media, as it requires a materialization of incomprehensible horrors. Thus, it seemed incredibly difficult to adapt a story like Annihilation without stripping it of what made it so fascinating. However, Alex Garland believed that he was up to the task.
Garland was hired to write and direct Annihilation in late 2014, and he decided to intentionally take things in a different direction than the books. First, Garland decided not to read the sequels, as he didn’t want to be influenced by them. Second, Garland tried not to reference the book while writing, basing it on his memory in order to give the film a dream-like feel. So, this allowed him to make some major changes to the series’ world, such as renaming Area X “The Shimmer” and giving it a definitive extraterrestrial origin rather than the more ambiguous explanation in the book.
Annihilation wasn’t a box office success, with it only making $43.1 million against a budget of $55 million. However, the movie was a big critical success. The film currently holds 88% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 67% audience score, proving that it was a bit more divisive with general audiences. It is considered to be one of the best movies of 2018 and one of Alex Garland’s best films.
